It seems like every time you visit a new web site, you are faced with one of several atrocities:
cookie warnings that are coercive rather than welcoming.
sign up for our newsletter! PLEASE!
intrusive geocoding demands
requests to send notifications
videos that pop up
login banners that want to track you by some other ID
carousels that are the modern equivalent of the tag
the 29th media request that hit a 404
pages that take 3 seconds to load
The thing that I keep coming back to is that developers have forgotten that there is a human on the other end of the http connection. As a result, I find very few websites that I want to bookmark or go back to. The web started with egalitarian information-centric motivation, but has devolved into a morass of dark patterns. This is not a healthy trend, and it makes me wonder if there is any hope for the emergence of small sites with an interesting message.
And let’s not forget the perfectly optimized SEO articles which are not really answering your question, but are perfectly optimized to be found by you. Cause why wouldn’t this recipe author be so desperate to write a novella describing their favourite holiday from 10 years ago, before telling me to heat some oil in a pan. And then it almost always goes like this:
Like finding a recipe?
Title
History of the author's childhood
Events leading up to their discovery of the recipe
Link to how Jeff Bezos can get you started in real estate for $100
Places they've traveled to give them inspiration
(nine scrolls down) The actual recipe
Ads for pricy kitchen equipment you'll never need
Half-screen modal asking for your email for more of this shit.
Then to be the cherry on the top of the cake, now we also have:: having to upload your ID to access a website. Which is perfectly secure as we all know and a data has never been leaked or stolen, and every institution only ever cares about your safety you know? /s The force that ruined the web is the same force that ruined everything else in this world, i.e. corporate greed. And that includes me although i also write for fun. In today’s world we are just fuel to the enshittification of everything online, information for information’s sake. For a web soon to be dark like a forest at night, with nothing and no one to find. Hallucinating on human knowledge for the last bits of it’s existence.
someone else did this design and i don't remember who but it resonates with me and i am forever thankful for them
